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After a successful project to Mars, the United Arab Emirates space firm is planning a trip to the debris box between Mars and Jupiter, focusing on one of its most intriguing objects.
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By Kenneth Chang
Taking advantage of the good fortune of its Hope spacecraft, which continues to circle Mars, the United Arab Emirates on Monday announced plans for an ambitious follow-up mission: a major excursion to the asteroid belt.
“The asteroid belt projects the right challenge,” said Sarah al-Amiri, president of the UAE Space Agency. “Interesting science applicable to the clinical community, smart opportunities for collaboration. “
The spacecraft, named MBR Explorer after Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, is expected to be unveiled in 2028. , spinning at 20,000 miles per hour in the direction of six more elements in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
“We would get a more detailed look at the surface of the asteroid,” said Hoor al-Mazmi, the mission’s lead scientist. “And we would get the internal density and design of the asteroid. “
The seventh asteroid, Justitia, is the most intriguing. At about 30 miles across, Justitia is very reddish, a color for an asteroid. In fact, it looks more like one of the small icy worlds discovered in the Kuiper Belt, which circles the sun beyond Neptune. Orbit.
This led planetary scientists to speculate that Justitia formed in the far reaches of the solar system, then dispersed inward through the converting orbits of the giant planets, and eventually joined the asteroid belt.
If true, a Justitia would provide a close-up examination of a Kuiper Belt object without the long adventure to the far reaches of the solar system.
The MBR Explorer is expected to sneak a few hundred meters from Justitia in October 2034 and spend at least seven months with cameras and spectrometers that can identify the asteroid’s composition, adding the presence of water. The reddish color is idea to imply carbon-based. molecules that are the building blocks of life. The spacecraft will also launch a small lander to land on the surface of Justitia.
With a mass of more than two tonnes, the MBR Explorer will be larger than Emirates’ Hope spacecraft, which went to Mars. The asteroid
“Complexity adds up,” Mohsen al-Awadhi, the mission’s program director.
And the spacecraft will need to be introduced within 3 weeks in March 2028 to be able to perform all planned flybys. If it can’t take off, the entire project will have to be rescheduled, probably with new asteroid destinations.
To date, NASA, the European Space Agency, China and JAXA, the Japanese agency, have sent robotic spacecraft to asteroids.
The United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich country smaller than the state of Maine, is a newcomer to area flights. Two decades ago, there was no area program.
Today, it is increasingly active in space, as part of a push to revive a high-tech industry in the country in the long term, where oil will no longer be as heavy. This includes sending astronauts to the International Space Station, and added one, Sultan al-Neyadi, lately in orbit.
In 2009, Emirates’ first satellite, Dubai Sat-1, entered orbit. It was built in South Korea, but Emirati engineers most commonly worked as apprentices at the satellite manufacturer. Nine years later, Dubai’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center built KhalifaSat, a terrestrial satellite, without foreign help.
For the Mars mission, its first foray into the solar system, the UAE has again recruited foreign aid, from the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Hope was introduced in July 2020 and reached orbit around Mars seven months later. He goes on to examine how weather, such as dust storms, slows the rate at which Mars’ thin environment escapes into space. Recently, he captured high-resolution images of Deimos, the smaller of the two Martian moons.
Emirati area officials discussed the concepts about the next destination. “We have analyzed the entire solar formula in terms of what will happen after the Emirates mission to Mars,” al-Amiri said.
Pete Withnell, who served as assignment manager for Emirates’ Mars mission, the Colorado lab would have “even more intense involvement” in the new asteroid mission.
Some Emiratis who, as aerospace rookies, built the Hope spacecraft are now among the leaders of the asteroid mission. This includes M. al-Awadhi, a former Emirates airline maintenance engineer who served as a senior systems engineer on the Mars mission.
Withnell said it’s possible the new spacecraft could be reassembled in Colorado and that other organizations were also involved. The Italian Space Agency is offering one of the spectrometer’s tools and San Diego’s Malin Space Science Systems is building any of the cameras.
But this time many more will be manufactured in the Emirates. Fifty percent of the money spent on the project will have to be spent domestically.
“It’s a requirement we didn’t have” for the Mars mission, Mr. al-Awadhi, adding, “It’s a big difference. “
“We will expand our local industry,” al-Amiri said.
The variety of asteroids visited through MBR Explorer will provide useful clinical comparisons for asteroids to be visited in other projects, such as Lucy, a NASA project unveiled in 2021.
“I think it’s a smart mission,” Hal Levison, Lucy’s principal investigator, said of the Emirati mission. “It will load anything exclusive that NASA has no plans to do. “
Planetary scientists could find out if Justitia is an intruder from the outer solar system. of the red matter as you get closer,” he said.
Thus, Justitia, which is as red as an object far from the Kuiper belt, is too red for its location.
“This provides us with a mystery,” Dr. Levison said.
Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry and planets. Before he was a science writer, he was a graduate student whose studies focused on caos. @kchangnyt
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